New Berlin Talks Next Week

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29798, 14 April 1962, Page 11

New Berlin Talks Next Week

(N.Z. Press Association—Copyright)

NEW YORK, April 13. East-West talks on the Berlin issue will be resumed in Washington next Monday in an atmosphere that has been more favourable to accommodation than at any time since last June, according to the “New York Times.” The United States Secretary of State (Mr Dean Rusk) and the new Soviet Ambassador to Washington (Mr Anatoly Dobrynin) planned to hold the first of a series of meetings to consider the possibilities of a settlement of. the divided city’s status, a Washington dispatch reported. They would pick up where Mr Rusk and the Soviet Foreign Minister (Mr Andrei Gromyko) left off in Geneva two weeks ago. The dispatch added: “While the formal bargaining positions of the Soviet Union and United States remain fundamentally incompatible, policy makers here (in Washington) expect the Russians to evince once more the desire to keep on talking about Berlin and to avoid incidents there during the talks. “The absence of Communist harassments of the Allied position in Berlin for the second week has greatly raised hopes.” Report by General

President Kennedy’s retiring personal representative in West Berlin. General Lucius Clay, brought an encouraging report on the Berlin sit-

nation to Washington yesterday. General Clay told the President and Mr Rusk that tensions were lower than they had been for some time. He said that he expected them to remain low for “some time.”

The newspaper said both Mr Kennedy and General Clay emphasised that there was still no settlement of East-West differences in Germany. However, the General expressed the view that there was more hope for negotiations.

The dispatch said the reason for the Communist cessation -of harassment of Allied flights across East Germany remained a matter of speculation. One widely discussed theory was that the Communists were holding back in anticipation of the start of United States nuclear tests in the atmosphere. When the tests began later this month, according to the theory, the Russians would then accuse the West of disrupting a generally relaxed atmosphere.